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Why I believe ubuntu 13.04 will be a game changer:

I have been using ubuntu 13 since the first alpha and I can categorically state that this is by far the best experience I've had with ANY distro... or OS for that matter.

Unity became extremely functional and clean... the theme needs to be reworked as it suffers from 'gnome' (unelegant ugly fat icons), the 'ambiance' colors are also all wrong and the design clearly lacks... but the speed and 'structure' is absolutely amazing.

Gnome 3, lxde, Windows 95 to 7, Os X 10.4 to 10.8, guess what DE I now prefer by a long shot? UNITY

I got so accostumed to unity that even in windows I'm placing my cursor on the left side to see if the bar pops up, frankly I can't even go back to elementary now and they had a killer DE.

Ubuntu 13 has been showing rock like stability and amazing speed, I have had some issues mostly pertaining to uninstalling software and the software center not working anymore and trying to disable background processes.

That said it is extremely easy to remove the photo/video/amazon lenses and reclaim 30 or so megs of ram. You can go even further and remove cups and bluetooth and you can have ubuntu 13 taking a whopping 300 MEGS OF RAM -> NO BS.

But what will be the game changer here?

third party software.

namely stuff like steam games and editshare's lightworks, libre office 4, all will pretty much be 'ubuntu certified'.

Sorry, but I want an OS that doesn't stuff my application launcher full of online ads. I want an OS that cares about the ecosystem and is able to work with the upstream and doesn't go purposelessly fragmenting the linux desktop any more than it needs. I want an OS that puts me in charge and lets me customize everything if I so choose, where I don't need 3rd party tools to change even the most basic things like the colour of the sidebar.

Mint gives me all that, and is compatible with everything ubuntu is. If I want to run steam or lightworks (if that ever stops being vaporware) I can. And Libreoffice runs on any distro.

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not fair of you to call lightworks vaporware as I have edited videos with it... the only criticism is that development is slow.

There are no online ads in the launcher. There are a bunch of dash lenses that do indeed give you online content like youtube videos, photos, amazon products etc... you can easily, in under a minute, go to software center and remove every and single lens you have (I did to turn off online search and save me ram)

The little icons you see in the launcher like youtube, reddit, amazon (that you call ads) are just firefox links and again easy and quick to remove.

You are right about the fragmentation thing like upstart and lots of other shit but that is a sin that is commited by most of linux distros.

Also right about the customization and I would add that the theme and colours are awful.

That said seeing how this unity was forked from gnome 3.6 and what a piece of shit g3.6 is and how functional and decent unity is at this point I can't throw much shit at them

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And every time you type something in your dash, it is sent to the Ubuntu servers which run PROPRIETARY, CLOSED-SOURCE code, just like the UbuntuOne servers run proprietary code. Canonical makes excuses, that "they need to keep their servers closed-source because otherwise they couldn't stay competitive". So basically, part of Ubuntu's functionality is tied in with Canonical's proprietary, closed-source software, to keep competition from making a similar system. Canonical doesn't really care about the open source community, they just want to use linux the same way apple uses bsd, without giving anything back to the community.

Most linux distros also collaborate with each other, Ubuntu just does things like it wants and doesn't give a crap about the rest of the ecosystem. Upstart, lightdm, compiz... and now they plan on making their own display server instead of using wayland. If they managed to do that, that would be horrible for the ecosystem, because it would add even more fragmentation, and if they managed to get steam, etc. supporting their display server, that'd be bad for all the other distros.

Cinnamon was also forked from Gnome, and I find it much faster, better and easier to use than Unity. It's also much more flexible and customizable (although not quite as flexible as MATE or LXDE).

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I have been using ubuntu 13 since the first alpha and I can categorically state that this is by far the best experience I've had with ANY distro... or OS for that matter.

Hi,

Can you please tell a little bit about the File Manager? Does it look like the former Nautilus? Can you still have the Menu and the Treeview pane? Is it still possible to do Dual-Pane (Split view) as before?